Amongst the many reports that ad serving platforms such as Google Adwords and Yahoo! Search Marketing the content network is often seen as less reliable a producer than the search network. This is mostly because control measures in the content network are not as instant as those in the search network. A negative keyword becomes active when entered into the campaign or ad group, you don’t know what sites to exclude until your ads have been served there.
Whenever I start a content campaign one of the most important activities is to start excluding sites from having ads served. Using Google’s site placement report I can see what sites have served the ad. Then comes the evaluation of each site. When I look at sites that are serving clients’ content ads I consider the following:
1. Is the topic relevant to the client?
2. Is the site relevant to the target market?
3. What is the Google Page Rank of the site?
4. What is the Alexa rating of the site?
5. Is the site nothing more than a bunch of links, and no content?
6. Do I find more than one site that looks exactly the same except for the domain?
7. Where on the site do the ads appear?
There are a lot of junk site that have been put up by pyramid scheme companies that can suck the ROI out of a campaign if not kept in check. Having a plan of action on evaluating content network sites helps bring more control to content network campaigns.
